NBCSN is showing a few Big Bash League games this season live (read: middle of the night in North America). I woulda never followed the BBL; if do bother being up at weird hours to watch Twenty20 it’s usually the Indian Premier League. But I feel like it’s my patriotic duty to support cricket in the U.S. I heard Melbourne was kind of like San Francisco and the Renegades have Trinis Dwayne Bravo and Sunil Narine, so I think I’ve found my team.

This thesis examines the extent of the diffusion of baseball across the world. Tracing the diffusion of baseball, and the diverse receptions the game has encountered on foreign soils, holds out the prospect of offering many insights into the global spread of the processes of globalization in general. By sport and our understanding of different responses to baseball, and developing our empirical knowledge to examining the extent of its diffusion, we will be in a position to draw more reliable and valid conclusions than have, thus far, been offered in relation to the global diffusion of baseball specifically, and globalization processes more generally.

With specific reference to baseball, many authors have concluded that we are presently witnessing an acceleration in the globalization of that sport. … However, the unanimity of these writers should not be allowed to conceal the fact that their arguments tend to have two things in common. Firstly, they are fundamentally ethnocentric. … Secondly, their generalizations lack any substantive empirical support.

I do occasionally post linguistic stuff here, when it comes up in the course of my travels (foreigners talk funny!) but a recent Language Log comment thread is also relevant to American cricket, as well as, my other love, baseball:

Rounders was played by boys and (far worse!) girls. The only adults who played it were strictly working class. So naturally the identification of baseball with rounders annoyed the Americans tremendously, and an ideology arose rejecting any English origin of baseball as unpatriotic. Enter Abner Doubleday…

Yes, baseball and rounders are both different codifications of a popular kind of rural game played in the southeast corner of England in early modern times. There are, or were, others, such as stoolball—which we played at school in the 1960s—and bat and trap, now almost extinct. Cricket comes from the same family tree, but diverged longer ago. They are all native to Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire.

Baseball fans are thrilled when a player gets three home runs in a game or their team hits five over the course of nine innings. A few weeks ago the young South African rookie, Richard Levi, hit 13 sixes on his way to a world record fastest century.

Picture this: it’s 1992 and you’re a tourist in some quaint and picturesque English village. It’s a midsummer’s day and you’re snoozing in your deck chair, basking in the late afternoon sun. The distant “clunk” of a leather ball meeting a willow blade is followed by a smattering of polite applause. You open your eyes and see a number of white clad figures walking off the smooth greensward and disappearing into the wooden pavilion, prettily framed by oak and elm. After six hours of play the game is over.

And now picture this: it’s 2012 and your ears are bombarded by the shouts and screams of 50,000 fans as techno music thuds and blares through the cacophony. Down below, cheerleaders are jumping up and down as a man in orange and purple clothing has just slammed a white ball out of the stadium while the men in pink and blue stand around in disbelief